International businesses involved in global operations need electronic access to financial services. Their reasons include operational imperatives to have instantaneous access to consolidated information, the global nature of the world's economies, the inter-dependencies between products and services in one region and another, and the price competitiveness between global entities, the sheer growth and trajectory of information capabilities makes electronic global access to services an axiom. Today's international businesses clearly understand that they have a need to not only be “globally present” but also “globally aware.” For institutions, such as international money-center banks, whose business it is to deliver global corporate banking services, effective and efficient electronic delivery is core to their existence.
Developing an effective and efficient electronic delivery of corporate banking services has been a challenge for the industry. From 1975 to 1998, there have been several efforts at developing electronic banking services. Most have been either single product in orientation, single region, and limiting in the technology's ability to meet even basic needs. In the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, many of the systems were based upon the concept of terminal emulation. In the middle 1980s disk operating system (DOS) workstations became popular, then in the latter 1980s to early 1990s, the technology further shifted from mainframe central processing unit-to-central processing unit (CPU-to-CPU) communications to Windows® Workstations with proprietary software loaded on the end-client's machines. All of these, while delivering some measure of functionality, fell far short of the needs as a platform and infrastructure to keep pace with the business needs. What's worse is that many of these systems still remain today and incur substantial infrastructure, maintenance, and support costs associated with their continued use. In addition, traditional prior art computer systems have several deficiencies that need to be addressed, including the following:
Existing computer systems have high operating costs. Deployment costs are also extremely high. Deployment requires site visits by electronic banking teams, and support costs are also high for software installed on customer sites—especially for supporting numerous customer operating environments/local area networks (LANs). Software updates often require the dispatch of bank technicians to each customer site for the installation. Existing systems also typically have inferior security, including unreliable hardware-based security solutions. Many systems are not compliant with the latest corporate security standards.
Another problem with the prior art is fragmented product delivery. Many customers have multiple systems in their offices, and each system is specifically focused on delivery of a single product. Platforms capable of integrating across products are rare at best. There are also problems with existing systems because they require extensive time to market. Time-to-market is key to competition, and a one year lead time on new capabilities development is typically needed. The development process requires integration with full release and deployment of new services gated by implementation capability (2-3 months lead time and growing).
Existing systems also have high cost to market. The current per site cost deployment/support for these systems is too high for profitable delivery to new market segments, and this is especially true for third-world emerging markets. Further, the infrastructures of these systems are typically inflexible, and institutions are unable to deliver new products (e.g., image delivery) to customers with existing infrastructures. Another problem with existing systems is that they typically only address generic electronic banking services. Large software systems often lack personalization and customization from the perspective of banking customers, and electronic banking services available to each particular customer need to be tailored to meet the preference and need of each customer. For instance, a small, domestic company may use its bank strictly for paying bills, accounts receivable and payroll. The company would not have a need for any international transactions and would preferably avoid these selections in the interest of saving time.
There is thus a need for a system and method to overcome the problems of the prior art.